Balancing act [Technically speaking]

Ralph Barclay was walking through the engineering library at Washington State University, just minding his own business, when it called out to him. He couldn't say why, it just did. It was a booklet, about 18 by 23 centimeters and maybe a centimeter thick, on display in the library's new periodicals section. Its pale blue cover proclaimed it to be the November 1960 issue of something called The Be...
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When was the last time you saw an engineer portrayed glamorously in a film-or, for that matter, in any form of popular culture? Right. Let's face it: The unflattering stereotypes persist, and they're tired. They're also out of touch with reality. Just consider the five engineers we profile here.
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The dark gray Jeep Wrangler, modified to run off batteries instead of gasoline, wowed the judges at the Pennsylvania state science fair. The year was 1999, and electric vehicles of any kind were still a novelty in the United States. But then the judges took a closer look at the high school students who had converted the Jeep-mostly black teenagers from an inner-city Philadepphia neighborhood-and d...
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Hanging in the loby at Recon Instruments is a framed postcard from Mischo Erban, who last year clocked the fastest standing longboard run ever: 129.94 kilometers per hour-over 80 miles per hour.
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You love music, yet you're also drawn to engineering, and you can't decide which to pursue. What to do? Why, become a tonmeister, of course. That's what Geoff Martin did. No kidding: His official title is tonmeister of Bang & Olufsen, the Danish company that since 1925 has been showing the world that well-engineered audio and video equipment can also be beautiful. The German word tonmeister, M...
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In late August 2010, Marcia Lee, newly graduated from Stanford with a master's degree in computer science, packed her car and drove north from Silicon Valley for what she thought would be a fantastic job at Microsoft and an awesome apartment in Seattle. She turned out to be right about the digs but wrong about the work. So after just five months, Lee quit Microsoft and headed back to Silicon Valle...
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Inside the main cabin of MS Turanor Planet Solar, the first boat to travel around the world on sunlight alone, Christian Ochsenbein opens a trap-door hidden beneath a seat cushion and crawls inside. He climbs down a dark tube and squats inside a long, narrow chamber-one of two pontoons keeping the catamaran afloat. "We are now inside the 'engine' room," he jokes. This being a solarpowered boat, th...
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You wake up with a heavy head. Was it the half dozen glasses of champagne last night or are you getting sick? In your bathroom is a little strip of paper that can tell you for sure. You place it on your tongue and after a few seconds, you pull it back to see the bad news: There's a small green dot next to the word "flu." When you fish your doctor's business card out of your wallet, you notice it l...
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The University of Kinshasa, the largest university in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has nearly 30 000 students, faculty, and research staff-but only 800 computers. And although its internal data network is fast enough to support on-campus e-mail, virtual library access, and online coursework, its link to the outside world is no better than that of a typical household in the United States or Eu...
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